Classical and Popular Music of Poland
Write the first paragraph of your page here. Classical Music Polish classical music was shaped by the Romantic movement, led by the Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849). Chopin’s works connected the virtuosity of Romantic era music with Polish folk music. A large part of his works were written for piano, which shaped the future of Polish music. Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) was the creator of emotional music, including folk colourings (eg. The ballet Harnasie). Other composers were forced to write celebratory works as a result of political pressure during and after the Second World War. These composers tried to maintain the folk style of their music within these regulated works by alluding to folk music or the ideals of absolute music. After 1956, the pressure on composers to write these celebratory works waned, and they once again enjoyed artistic freedom. As a result, these budding artists founded the “Warsaw Autumn” International Festival of Contemporary Music, which is one of the most highly regarded music festivals still held in Europe. Styles that soon arose included aesthetic ideas related to sonorism, which is the technique of creating music based solely on sound color. The leading composer of this musical style was Krzysztof Penderecki (1933). His “avant-gardism was shocking” because of his use of day to day sounds found both in nature and civilization. Sonorism focuses on the characteristics and qualities of sound—timbre, texture, articulation, dynamics, and movement—to create form. In sonorist works there is no melody, rhythm, or harmony in the traditional sense of the terms. There is more emphasis on texture than traditional chord progression and counterpoint. It is associated with an experimental movement that arose in Poland in the mid 1950s and flourished through the 1960s. It emphasizes discovering new types of sounds from traditional instruments, as well as the creation of textures by combining different, often unconventional instrumental sounds in unusual and unique ways. (Sonorism wiki; Granat 2001) The epitome of this style is the focal point of Penderecki’s threnody to the Victims of Heroshima and his First String Quartet, which were both composed in 1960. This work is written for 52 string instruments, and evokes impressions that are solemn and catastrophic; a nod to the rememberance of the Heroshima incident. Penderecki uses microtonality—using quarter tones—which produces dissonance that is much more profound than using traditional tones. He also uses sound mass, an effect where 36 voices produce an “invisible canon” which literally sounds like a wall of sound. This technique within the context of this work alludes to the screams of the thousands of victims of Hiroshima. Similar to Penderecki’s avant-garde style, Pawel Szymanski and Pawel Mykietyn returned to traditional styles, which included Classicism, Romanticism, and Baroque. Their goal was to “discover new meaning in classical art in the context of contemporary culture, which places both composers in the camp of the musical postmodernists. Popular Music Polish popular music appeared and fluorished in the post-war era of the 20th century with a major emphasis in jazz, and remained that way until 1950. After 1950, Communist regimes declared that jazz music was an expression of symphathy with a hostile ideology, so this style of music was promptly prohibited. During the later half of the 1950s however, together with the “ideological thaw”, popular music made a resurgence. The leader of this renewed movement was writer Leopold Tyrmand who organized Poland’s first international jazz festival called Jazz Jamboree, the oldest in Europe. With the seeds of Poland’s artistic movement planted in the late 1950s, the “greatest concentration of artistic activity towards the creation of an individual musical identity took place in Poland during the Sixties”. The 1960s was a time in Poland’s history where young artists were finally free to share their music and art. Most notibly was the development of the jazz discographies of the violinist and composer Michal Urbaniak. Urbaniak pioneered the jazz style through his adaptations to future styles by incorporating rock and hip hop. His techniques include sound modulation mediated by electronics.